Will Our Coins Ever Be Valuable?

I've been a coin collector for over 50 years, and I've spent a sizable sum on my collection. But, I NEVER have considered it an investment in the monetary sense.
Yeah, it's an investment in my hobby. And as such, it has been worthwhile.
A few have increased in value, most haven't...or at least not enough to keep up with inflation. But, that's not the point.
It's impossible to reliably predict which of the bunch will beat inflation. So just enjoy the hobby.

There were coin collectors back then. This can be proven by newspaper articles from 1909 that discuss coin collectors gathering up all the 1909S-VDBs out of circulation and how they very quickly increased in value once this happened. The absolute number of collectors was smaller but the proportion was probably not too much smaller than today.

So yes, there would have been people back in 1913 dipping their coins in lacquer to preserve them. Whether they thought they'd ever be worth $100 is another question.


Besides the overall increase in the number of collectors as mentioned above, there are four main differences between the collectors of 1913 and those of 2026.
- The quality of coins today is much higher. Back in 1913, probably 1/3 of all the coins coming out of the Mint were so badly handled by the Mint itself that they wouldn't have qualified as Uncirculated.
- The quantity of coins is much higher. Higher overall numbers inevitably means more high-grade specimens survive.
- The methods of preservation of coins are better. The epitome of coin preservation in 1913 was a thick coating of shellac and a mahogany coin cabinet, because transparent plastic hadn't been invented yet; cellophane had only just been discovered in 1912.
- The amount of information available to collectors is much much greater. Informed, educated collectors are more likely to put aside coins that are actually worth preserving.


I've often commented on the long-term prospects of the value of collectable coins. To me, it's simply a matter of the expectations of supply and demand.

Supply: coins gradually decrease in number, as they are buried in landfill, melted down, lost at sea or otherwise obliterated from history. So even the largest mintages can tend to diminish in terms of absolute numbers. For countries such as the US with a large number of coin collectors, the presence of those coin collectors can have a curious effect: the rarer dates are more likely to get preserved from casual destruction, meaning that, in the long term, the relative "rarity" of specific dates or mintmarks will diminish.

Demand: this is harder to predict, as it requires deep understanding of human psychology. But my reasoning is this: the demand for coins largely depends on the prevalence of those coins in a person's everyday experience. There are a lot of collectors out there today who collect nickels, dimes and quarters, and only a tiny percentage who collect half-cent, 2 cent, 3 cent, and 20 cent coins with equal passion. Why? Because those coins are all long obsolete - no one alive remembers those coins being used in everyday circulation - and they are thus of interest only to those of a, shall we say, antiquarian mindset - they like old, obsolete things.

If, as has long been predicted by certain pundits, our generation is the last which will see coins considered as a normal everyday experience as part of trade and commerce, then this generation will likewise be the last to see coin collecting as the large and popular hobby that it is today. And this will inevitably lead to a fall in demand. And if this does in fact occur, then that drop in demand will fall faster than the very slow, gradual fall in supply from loss and destruction - which should (if I am correct in my prognostications) lead to declining prices.

For evidence, just look at formerly popular collectables where technology has already caused the objects being collected to be regarded as "old and obsolete". Phonecards come to mind; back in the 1990s they were all the rage and became popular and valuable collectables. Then everybody got smartphones, public phones became mostly-obsolete and the few remaining public phones still around will accept ordinary credit cards and don't need special dedicated pre-paid cards to operate them. The phone companies stopped making cards, phonecards disappeared from public view, new collectors dried up, the demand collapsed, and now it's virtually impossible to give away a phonecard collection.

With the near-extinction of personal snail-mail and the global demise of government-owned postage services, postage stamps are rapidly moving in the same direction.

Something I've definitely noticed in the UK is that whereas the really scarce modern pre-decimal coins like the 1951 penny (mintage 120,000) have held their value and probably outstripped inflation, the semi-key date coins that coin magazines were encouraging collectors to put aside have not, at least not in circulated condition. In the late 1960s and early 1970s many collectors were putting aside coins with fairly low mintages like the 1922 and 1949 pennies and the 1961 and 1965 Scottish shillings in the hope that they would increase in value. Nowadays when I look through a big bowl of coins in my LCS marked '25 pence each' I think there are more of these semi-key dates than the really common dates: while the high mintage coins went into the melting pot, a high proportion of the 'semi-key' dates have survived and there are now far too many of them around than are required to satisfy all UK collectors.

I heard of a quote from some dealer (I forget who): "Something that was once common will never be rare".

Since the vast majority of coins are common, they will never be rare, and probably not particularly valuable. That includes most of mine, but that's OK.

Our coins will never be valuable. The mint just makes too darn many of them.